'Unbelievable': Nintendo 3DS hands-on

The company didn’t talk about how its stunning technology works during Tuesday’s brief demo for members of the press. But work it does: Without using special glasses, you can see a deep, rich 3D display on the top screen of the new Nintendo 3DS portable.

The short, interactive demos Nintendo showed after its conference Monday morning included peeks at new Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil games.

A slider on the right-hand side of the screen lets you adjust how “deep” the 3D effect looks. You can take it all the way down to zero and see the games in 2D, or you can crank it up.

I found about 80 percent intensity was just right for my eyes. When I had the 3D effect all the way up, I couldn’t quite focus on the scene in front of me. (It’ll likely be different depending on the individual player.)

Konami is producing a version of its hit PlayStation 3 game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for the Nintendo 3DS. The demo showed a first-person sequence in which all sorts of crazy things happened to hero Solid Snake, all playing with the 3D effect: Knives flew at the camera, and a massive alligator snapped its long jaws.

In the second half of the demo, Snake walked across a bridge and avoided enemies in his usual style. While we couldn’t control him, we could use the analogue stick on the 3DS to adjust the camera and see the 3D scene from many different angles.

That analogue stick on the side of the unit, by the way, is pretty fantastic. In sharp contrast to the Sony PSP’s tiny analogue nub, it’s a wide, convex pad that lets your thumb sit comfortably inside as you control the game. A standard digital control pad sits below it.

Capcom’s Resident Evil demo was a bit less involved. It was just a brief cinematic scene showing a few characters talking about something. (Probably zombies: I was too busy checking out the 3D effects to pay attention to what they were saying.)

The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They’re on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3D effect makes everything that much richer.

The other demo Nintendo showed wasn’t a game at all. It was a collection of 3D scenes from various Nintendo games. Each tableau, like a shoebox diorama, was animated, and we could move the camera around to better see how the 3D effect made the characters pop. Familiar faces from Mario, Zelda and Pikmin danced and played onscreen while we tilted the camera around.

You can only see the 3D effect if you’re looking at the 3DS screen straight on, although there’s a good amount of fudge factor there — you can move the unit around quite a bit and still get the effect.

It’s not as if you have to hold your hands in the exact perfect place. If you tilt the unit away from your face so it’s almost at a 180-degree angle, you can still see the 3D effect. If you tilt it left and right, you’ll lose the effect and the picture will go smudgy, like what happens when you remove your glasses during a 3D movie.

Nintendo will surely have actual games on the show floor when the E3 Expo opens later Tuesday. But this quick look made it easy to understand that the new 3DS really does do full-on 3D without glasses.

US Wired, which originally published this story, has an extra photo of the 3DS. Be sure to check it out!